Category Archives: Etsy Sellers Get the Shaft

This is outrageous! This much-deserved call out will soon be swept aside by Etsy; but Rusetsy intends it to stand. These thieves will not remain anonymous. It appears the same person (or entity) has opened several shops and flooded the Etsy marketplace (and search) with stolen designs (and photos) by this seller and others while also undercutting the original designer’s prices. All of these shops are from China which fact will most probably be scrubbed from the forum post.

All of these shops should be shut down by Etsy and there should be no second chance. This is not copyright infringement or trademark infringement by accident or ignorance; this is blatant thievery and should not be tolerated.

Instead of closing down the thread (which will soon happen), Etsy Administration should be closing down the shops.

Here’s how I feel about all this, in a nut shell…..
Etsy does not bring buyers to our shops (aside from a very small amount of accidental overflow through a messed up internal search attempt), we have to find buyers ourselves. That is fine – we pay for the right to display our products on their site, for a small fee. They are just a venue. It is also a tremendous time suck and hit-or-miss undertaking with no promise of the hard work of finding customers panning out. If we can’t find our buyers, we have little, if any, chance of succeeding. To have the “venue” that you pay rent to arbitrarily syphon off our efforts of getting buyers into our shops, and then redirect them to our competition, is highway robbery in my book. Those buyers belong to the person who found them, since we have to harvest them. The venue obviously feels otherwise, for what reason, I cannot imagine. To have the venue help themselves and send them to our competition crosses so many ethical lines, I can hardly talk about it. There are a lot of things happening here that I think cross the line of ethics in so many ways…but as long as people, myself included, tolerate it, it will not change. It weighs heavily on me and as soon as I figure out an alternative market for my products, I will head there – pronto!

…One thing that’s important to keep in mind is that the Activity Feed is a social shopping feature…

A social shopping feature? More like an advertising feature. How long until the recommendations become paidads, ie, another revenue stream for Etsy??

…It is not intended to be a tool to help manage your shop…

So….. what is the intent of recommendations??

The experiments showed that the new user recommendation stories caused a significant increase in many good things: Overall number of purchases, number of favorites, and usage of the activity feed, just to name a few….

Ahhh yes, the many good things… many good things for who? Overall number of purchases certainly benefits Etsy… at the expense of annoying the hell out of millions of users who may decide not to return to the intrusive in-your-face-recommendations-Etsy. And of course there was increased usage of the activity feed… from Etsy cramming it full of recommendations, then users deleting them all. Increased favorites? Favorites are one. big. joke.

Once again, Etsy creates a feature that benefits Etsy Inc. and expects users to believe we created it just for you.

As if there is not already enough bullshit on the site, Etsy has rolled out a new feature – Etsy Recommendations, the Etsy version of popup ads. This feature crams a user’s activity feed with Etsy-recommended shops and products and advertises to you, dear seller, through your own shop.

Don’t those programmers have anything better to do? Like giving shop owners more sections? Or making it possible to run multiple shops from one account? You know, those features Etsy customers have been requesting for years.

So. Head’s up. Don’t be surprised to click on your favorites one morning and find this staring you in the face:

In the October 26th Q&A, Kellan was asked if there was a new policy allowing links from the About Page to a seller’s standalone website selling the same products as in their Etsy shop. The question was asked because Etsy had recently featured five sellers in a blog post, 5 Etsy Sellers Partnering with Manufacturers, andof those five, four were practicing fee avoidance by linking to their retail website from their About Page.

The seller wanted to know if this was now an accepted practice so that she and other sellers could also enjoy the benefits of an About Page link.

This was Kellan’s reply (emphasis added):

You bring up a good point. The relevant policy is this one regarding fee avoidance and it hasn’t changed:

But I think it should probably be cleaned up and clarified. Doesn’t seem reasonable to ask shops to list a website and expect them not to sell on it.

I’ll get back to you.

Obviously, the answer was no, the policy has not changed and that practice is considered fee avoidance and is prohibited by Etsy’s Terms of Use. (And, um, GULP… as for those featured sellers…. I don’t know….But, I’ll get back to you…. just don’t hold your breath…)

Unbelievably, Administration replied. But again, no clarification or answer to the fee avoidance question:

I’ve noticed that A LOT of about pages have links out to their retail websites and other venues where they are selling the same items.

I know this is against the TOU’s and is considered fee avoidance.

So it would be REALLY NICE if admin would make an announcement about this part of the About Page since sellers will receive warnings for not being in compliance with the TOU’s of this site.

If you read the About Page section, it doesn’t address this specifically.. it just says something like.. the usual TOU’s about off-site links apply or something and then links you to the TOU’s where it says that you cannot link to off-site venues selling the same items…

And from the seller to whom Kellan said I’ll get back with you:

Would you please state definitively whether we can list our stand-alone website on our About page? IMPORTANT: this would be a website where we sell the same items that we are selling in our Etsy shops.
Please see these 2 threads where the issue was previously raised…

As Etsy continues down the Ebay path, it is becoming just another online marketplace. When buyers can no longer distinguish what makes made Etsy unique, it is no longer unique. It’s just one more place to shop. So much for changing the world, Chad.

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Meet the New Etsy Buyer

by Anonymous Reader (with permission)

During the holidays I was able to speak with some of my relatives and friends, most of them female, all of them seasoned online shoppers, about their knowledge and experience with Etsy. The age range of these ladies was from about 30 to 60s and all in all they are a pretty savvy group. Which really scares the hell out of me because I realized as we spoke, that they represent the market that Etsy and their Chinese reselling friends so desperately want and need for their success.

My sister in law is in her early 60s, a tech genius who worked for IBM and who knows her way around the internet way better than most younger folk. She was my main “subject” if you will, because she admits to being a passionate shopper online and in the brick and mortar world. First I asked her if she knew about Etsy and she said yes, of course, that in fact she had just purchased something, I think it was a piece of jewelry, that she had been looking for, and that it was inexpensive, and that it came from China which was not a problem. I asked if she knew Etsy was a site that was primarily for handmade and vintage items, one of a kind stuff, and she said no, that she had never heard that. In fact, as far as she knew, Etsy was just another place to shop like Ebay or Amazon, and that she really doesn’t care that much about handmade goods to begin with; when she shops she does a Google search and then compares to see who’s got the best price. For what it’s worth, that was the prevailing attitude with everyone I spoke to in the last week: Etsy is another Ebay where you can get good deals on a lot of stuff, not appliances, computers and such. nobody knew or cared about resllers or the handmade or vintage angle; in fact, someone said they thought that Etsy was doing a good job of picking the BETTER sellers from China or wherever because they had such nice products.

So folks, there you have it. I think all legitimate handmade artisans and vintage sellers need to say a prayer to whatever gods they worship, that Zibbet or CraftStart or whoever gets their act together and gives us a new marketplace for our stuff. Etsy is so over.